in the Hudson, so badly beaten he could only be identified by his fingerprints.
With what they had on the Giordano’s, the FBI moved in and in the process of interrogating family members, Wire discovered how the family learned of her informant. The bureau’s higher ups, at the time a particularly spineless lot, were not about to touch the son of the vice president. Incensed, Wire took matters into her own hands and found Wellesley Jr. at a Washington DC bar and proceeded to, Giordano style, savagely beat him to a pulp around the face until the Secret Service, hanging idly outside the bar, was able to get inside and take Wire into custody.
At a minimum, Dara Wire was out of the bureau and was looking at far worse trouble. However, she had one ace in the hole and the Bishop smiled. He loved and admired power plays and Wire had the ultimate power player come to her defense—Judge Dixon.
She’d come to his attention while he was still the attorney general due to her impressive undercover work. The Judge intervened on her behalf and threatened to expose the vice president’s son and few knew how to do that like Dixon. The Judge was able to leverage a soft departure from the bureau for Wire. Donald Wellesley Jr., meanwhile, disappeared from view for a number of months to recuperate from his injuries.
With McRyan and Wire on the hunt, the Bishop had reason to worry.
Of course, he’d have much preferred to operate without there ever being even the possibility of any loose ends requiring Kristoff to ply his services in so many places and to such brutal effect. The Bishop often thought of his operations as a layer cake, with layer after layer between himself and what he was trying to accomplish. His involvement was never known or discovered.
However, there were times when you had to move quickly and didn’t have the luxury of setting up the layer cake. When Heath Connolly came to him about his friend Peter Checketts and the trouble he was having in Las Vegas, the Bishop saw the opening and the chance to grab the election out of the jaws of defeat, but they had to move quickly.
“There was no time for the layer cake,” he muttered, sipping his coffee.
There was no layer cake, and then Kentucky went bad.
It seemed like a simple and safe enough meeting, especially with Kristoff solving the Martin problem in Milwaukee at the same time. The meeting was like so many he’d arranged over the years that had gone off without a hitch. And the Kentucky meeting was necessary. Given the money and stakes at risk, he and Connolly needed to be certain their plan would work and needed to see how it would work. But then the meeting was discovered and he’d been tying off loose ends ever since—Stroudt, Montgomery, McCormick and Checketts.
Now the extremely capable McRyan and Wire were investigating.
They were a danger.
The two of them were relentless and would not stop.
They presented him with one last loose thread to clip and the man to solve that problem was coming up his driveway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“You ever see Bullitt?”
The Judge sat on a folding chair in the bowels of Crisler Arena on the campus of the University of Michigan and poured over the electoral map as he listened to Michigan’s governor rev up the crowd for Governor Thomson, who would speak in five minutes. Michigan was largely in the bag, the governor up by eight points, but they wanted to be sure and much of their campaigning, and the media coverage it would garner, would seep into the northern Ohio media markets, which was prime vote territory.
Yet despite the enthusiasm in the arena, the Judge was dour. Something was going on at DataPoint and it was going to have an impact on the election. “Fucking Connolly,” he grumbled, as he stood up and heard the roars of the crowd come through the halls of Crisler Arena on the campus of the University of Michigan.
“You were right, of course,” Sally Kennedy said, standing ten feet back. She’d walked unnoticed into the anteroom a minute earlier and was watching the Judge pore over the map.
“About?”
“Connolly.”
The Judge twirled his cigar in his right hand. “I’ve met many a political operator in my day, Ms. Kennedy. And most of them understood there was a certain honor that came with doing this. They loved their country.”